Iress Open - Standard Integration Trouble Shooting Guide

[jim.farrell]

Purpose of this page is to list solutions to Integration queries raised by our clients or the Third Parties.  As the number of adopters increases there are likely to be more specific issues.  Please also note you could try the FAQ located here.

Topic: User Groups

Identified in: Integration Enablement / Practifi

A couple of users have expressed confusion regarding the permission of users and how it interacts with an integration.  By way of background, in Xplan, clients are typically put into groups that can effectively form walls around who can see what. A client might be in one or many groups, and a user might also be in one or many groups. But in general, a user can only see those clients that are in groups that the user is also in.

There are a couple of notable exceptions.

1) First is that a user can always see the clients they are primary adviser on, regardless of group.

2) The System does have a capability that can be given to a user which enables them to “see all clients” which will override the group memberships and open up all clients.

Issues can arise when a practice tries to enable an integration for a user that is not in the same group as a specific client but does have this overriding capability.  This will manifest in the user having access in Xplan but not when using the standard integration where the restriction is tighter and will only allow the user to see clients within the boundaries of the group memberships, regardless of if the user has the overriding cap.

On the few instances where this has come up, adjusting the user’s group settings within the Xplan site will resolve the issue and is really quick an easy to do.

Topic: Missing Clients

Identified in: Initial Switch On / moneyinfo

A client firm in live pilot noticed that not all the Xplan client records they were expecting where being presented in the moneyinfo systems.

The capabilities of the client account were confirmed as correct and in line with the capabilities of the standard API key.  The groups that the missing clients belonged to were cross referenced against the groups that the service account had access to - also correct.

The discrepancy was due to that fact that the Standard Integration is restricted to transmitting 'active client entities' only.  This value is held in Xplan under 'client_status' where only status 0 'client' is included with  other statii positively excluded, for reference these being:

• Inactive/Archived → 2, 
• Group Plan Members → 4, 
• Prospect → 8,
• Contact → 32, 
• Deceased → 64,

This logic is documented in the integration specs - but this information might be useful for those less familiar with the design and / or where approaching from a testing perspective.

Topic: Capabilities 

Identified in: Pilot launch - various integrations

Differences were noted between the data a user could access via the Xplan UI opposed to via a Third Party Integration.  This is usually due to a disparity on capabilities.

The Iress Open Standard Integration has a number of capabilities associated to it that enable it to access the data points within Xplan.  These can be viewed in the API Key Portal.

When accessing the Xplan site the integration is doing so with the User credentials, the user will also have capabilities ascribed to it.

Both the User and the Key need to have the same capabilities to access the data location in Xplan via an integration.  For example the Standard Integration allows the 'creation of clients' via a capability of the same name, but if an Xplan user does not have that capability they will not be able to perform that function via the integration.

Topic: Document Note Size Limits

Highlighted by: Live issue encountered by Roar / Dash 

When adding document notes to Xplan via the Iress Open Standard Integration it was noted that some large files failed to process.

This was due to size limitations inherent in the solution.  First and foremost there is a limit on the API Gateway but after this there is a hard limit imposed by the Lambdas used in the service of 6Mb per invocation payload.

However this is reduced further by the encoding/decoding process that takes place.  As a rough guide we see PDF files of 4.5Mb being successfully processed but those closer to 5Mb failing as the resultant file size post processing is greater than 6Mb once base64 encoded.

To put this into a business context we tested a number of files and a 40 page full colour document with images is likely to comfortably fit under 4.5 and process correctly.

On a final note Xplan sites can have a size limit applied directly to them too but it is unlikely that this will be set to lower than the values described above.

Topic: Null values in Xplan for FundValue & Value are not supported by the API and error

Highlighted by: Distribution Technology identified the issue, during testing of the Dynamic Planner Integration.

When data was migrated or imported into the Xplan site, the fund_value in Pension was incorrectly brought in as a NULL.  Xplan is expecting this value to be 0.00 and so is the API, when the null is returned via the API it will error: 'Exception details: Object reference not set to an instance of an object.'

The simplest workaround is to access the record in Xplan, view/edit the pension after import/migration and save out, forcing the fund_value to be updated to either 0.00 or currency value generated by the linked portfolio account. This will then prevent the API erroring.